Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like
TW: Supporting violence
The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?
They paid to learn so… You go learn today
Um…good?
Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out
Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I’ll keep that in mind.
When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.
And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?
I assume it happened around the time most of us left for other places. The fascist community there probably hasn’t grown much in numbers, but as a percentage it increased because the decent people left.
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Why do they allow it? Many reasons I’d guess… engagement , capitalism, shared-beliefs.
Controversial things generate engagement.
Engagement generates profits.
Many of the decision makers are narcissistic conservatives who think the same thing, but instead of saying it they just enable it, indirectly achieving the same goal as hate-evangelizing.A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of “free speech”. Users are disgusted by what’s on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.
Yeah, I’m still active in the formula1 and NBA subs because politics there is practically banned. There was some drama lately because trump said it’s his merit if Lando Norris won the Miami Gran Prix…
If it wasn’t for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.
Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA’s and this blew them up popularity wise.
What Bernie didn’t have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.
Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen…then its not MAGA.
it was Gamergate.
Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be… and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.
Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian “Useful Idiots” who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)
I was so confused by gamergate.
you are very into something but the whole thing was so just, incoherent. Like I still don’t really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.
It was whatever you wanted it to be. I had one friend who bought the line that it was about “ethics in journalism” (imagine me doing a concussive eye roll here). He was on the redpill path at the time (luckily pulled back from the edge since). Anyway, I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimisation, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
It’s classic cruel optimism.
I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimization, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
Great way of framing it. I just stayed very clear of the whole thing because I couldn’t even identify coherent ‘sides’ at the time.
it was a test run that was more successful than the puppet masters ever anticipated, Which is why the only real coherent message out of it was the right wings downright contempt for women.
and those same tactics, and hell, even topics, are still being used today with Trumpism, Right Wing Extremism, and the Russian Puppets push for fascism in western countries.
idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald’s existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available… with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.
Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA
This should be the paragraph in text books.
In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death
Two things are happening simultaneously Russia/China are trying to spread discontent, and Trumps followers are being told they no longer have to abide by social norms that keeps societies civil.
I believe the uncivil thing just always comes in waves as the people that don’t like change are forced to change and get resentful. Some kind of event happens and resets the floor, or all the people that don’t want to change die off, and things settle down.
And this is the mental framework through which I see the world.
Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives.
Yes, in international subreddits. The national ones were often right leaning (e.g. r/Canada, r/Mexico).
I think reddit is Usally far left ngl (if that’s a word) I never really seen racism happening it just gets deleted
I remember someone on reddit saying the n slur to me I reported him and reddit deleted the account (idk?)
I said, “when will he die already”, referring to Trump? And was permanently banned. “Inciting violence.”
Probably a bit before The Donald was flooding the entire feed.
Anyone worth a shit left already. It’s full of normies and bots now. The “reddit is a psyop” guy is starting to make sense now.
We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?
Also bots.
The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork
After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.
If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.
June 30th, 2023. There were always subreddits like r/thedonald that used violent right wing authoritarian cult-like political rhetoric, but after the users and mods who gave half a shit left when they banned third party apps and sided with advertisers over the people keeping it from becoming 99% bots and bootlickers.
Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too
It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It’s Facebook.
It was never a niche social network. In the beginning, Spez used sockpuppets to fake engagement, later on advertisers and state actors (In 2016, they forgot to scrub the bots from their statistics, and posted that Eglin Airforce Base was the most reddit-addicted city) generated engagement.
What it absolutely was a niche network to the point where if reddit was mentioned in mainstream media it made big waves. Dudes even had secret greetings like when does the narval bacon or smt like that I don’t remember. But reddit was super niche and that’s what made it special imo. The first secret santa exchanges were trully amazing, unique experiences that will never be replicated again and the platform was full of these niche little gems that are forever lost now.
My theory is that if you were really principled, you would have got out of there a long time ago. So what you’ve got left are people who are ok to put up with a shitty status quo, so long as they get their fix. You know, moderates.
I don’t go on reddit anymore, but if it’s full of people who put up with shit, then it’s only natural that the shit started rolling in.
Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a long and recorded history.
